Summary & Conclusion (TL;DR): Age of Wonders 4 is just about everything I want in a 4X. It's what I would have wanted an Endless Legend 2 to be, if such a game existed. It's what I hoped Humankind might turn into (obviously minus the fantasy). It's a brilliant realization of many of my daydreams when I think on other 4X's I've played and their "potential." As it turns out, it's a beautiful thing when so much of that ever-elusive potential is brought into being right at the start of a game's life instead of being left as merely something to hope for.

Customization:
One of the big ticket selling points in the marketing for the game, both on the store page and ads/trailers delivered elsewhere and for good reason. AOW4 backs up the big game it talks when it comes to customizing a fantasy empire. What sets it apart here, compared to other games which also boast of customization, is that it doesn't stop being meaninful after empire creation. The quests, magics, and general aesthetics and even victory conditions keep the founding theme of your empire alive for the entirety of the game. Many games come up short in providing a lasting sense of identity for your empire and instead the player has to resort to keeping a headcanon in an effort to provide context for their actions and keep the story going, if that's something they're interested in.

Story:
While I'm talking about story: no, this game does not have a typical campaign. There is no button on the main menu that will tell you you're in the campaign mode. However, I find it pretty disingenuous to suggest that the game has no story simply because there is no big button labeled "Story Mode" on the first window. The game absolutely contains stories of varying lengths. These tales are told via specific story realms (which are themselves mini-campaigns with narration and interesting objectives), realms in general through the creation parameters, quests, and the empires at play which have strong identities in AOW4.

Gameplay:
AOW4 plays like a well put together 4X. It's not going to throw veterans of the genre for any loops. You can see the roots of the genre where you'd expect to find them, and then there's some personal flair on top. One example of said flair is in the city building system, specifically the idea of boosted production.

The process is usually as follows: select a project, it has a production time and a gold cost to start it. The typical answer to speed up the production time is to throw more production score at it. Many games have ways they handle this ranging from decrees, to civic bonuses, tile improvements which directly give production, etc.

All of the above are options that also work in AOW4, but a boosted project is something else altogether. Something very specific that I haven't seen elsewhere. It's quite simple, and even so it still feels incredibly good to work with. The way it works is that most "standard" city projects have a "boost" criteria in addition to the typical turn time and starting cost. This boost outlines specific province improvements (farms, mine, foresters, etc) which can be built in order to slash time to build and the project's gold cost. To be clear, the project can still be started without meeting this boost criteria! But the savings for boosted projects are significant and definitely worth trying to fit in. This one extra layer adds gameplay value to the city-building process without actually locking things away. You keep the freedom while gaining an avenue for skill expression and clever planning on top.

As part of gameplay I also want to briefly touch on combat. There is a lot of it to be done in AOW4. Each of the victory conditions are likely to see your empire drawn into conflicts with other entities just by the nature of striving to complete them. On a smaller scale; quests, resource sites, and roaming dangers are also often resolved through violence. Or at least violence is an option on the menu. So right off the bat I should mention that combat situation can be auto resolved. What's nice is that the auto-resolve here isn't just the game throwing the numbers together with no regard for how those unit might be employed (rest in pace, my many total war warhammer siege weapons...) and spitting back a result. The game will simulate the encounter and you can even watch the replay after it resolves to see what went right, or horribly wrong. If you're unsatisfied with the result, you are given an opportunity to retry the encounter manually and handle it yourself. Due to the fact that the auto resolves actually plays out the battle, I find that AOW4's auto-resolve actually behaves as expected (with allowances made for the fact that you may simply be better than the AI). It's not a forgone conclusion that I'm going to lose all of my high value units while my shield fodder which I recruited specifically to soak up damage and pin the enemy do nothing but watch.

If you set out to play your battle manually, you're zoomed into a battle space that is inspired by where the battle is taking place on the overworld. If it's a siege, there will be fortifications and a massive wall bisecting the field. If it happens out in the forest there will be trees and pushes which have material effect on the battlefield by providing things like "obscure" or just blocking movement altogether. Armies take turns starting with the defender. Units move in accordance to their actual overworld movement value, different unit types provide things like zones of control, pins, shield walls, and even their own miniature versions of some spells. Any enchantments that your empire is sustaining come into play here as well and augment their weapons and armor and finally this is also where you as the player get to use your "tactical spells." Battles come in many sizes, from heroic 1v1s to 18v18 sprawling bloodbaths which may also feature in-combat summons!

Pacing:
Matches are tight, action packed affairs that tend to last me around 70-110 turns and I've seen reports of people smashing through realms in 40. There's not much of the "index finger on the enter key spamming end turn while waiting for the inevitable approach of the heat death of the universe (or even more immediately, your CPU)." Unless you are deliberately padding things out or chasing personal goals, each turn offers the chance to bring victory noticeably closer.